Heavens

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Sea of Japan and saw Tropical Depression Namtheun weakening.

On Monday, Sept. 5 at 0300 UTC (Sept. 4 at 11 p.m. EDT) Tropical depression Namtheun was dissipating over the Sea of Japan. Infrared imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite revealed patchy and limited convection (rising air that condenses and forms the clouds and thunderstorms that make up a tropical cyclone).

Using colors to identify the approximate ages of more than 130,000 stars in the Milky Way's halo, Notre Dame astronomers have produced the clearest picture yet of how the galaxy formed more than 13.5 billion years ago.

Spatial memory is something we use and need in our everyday lives. Time for morning coffee? We head straight to the kitchen and know where to find the coffee machine and cups. To do this, we require a mental image of our home and its contents. If we didn't have this information stored in our memory, we would have to search through the entire house every time we needed something. Exactly how this mental processing works is not clear. Do we use one big mental map of all of the objects we have in our home? Or do we have a bunch of small maps instead - perhaps one for each room?

Operation IceBridge, NASA's airborne survey of polar ice, is flying in Greenland for the second time this year, to observe the impact of the summer melt season on the ice sheet. The IceBridge flights, which began on August 27 and will continue until September 16, are mostly repeats of lines that the team flew in early May, so that scientists can observe changes in ice elevation between the spring and late summer.

In the mid-1800s, astronomers surveying the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere noticed something strange: Over the course of a few years, a previously inconspicuous star named Eta Carinae grew brighter and brighter, eventually outshining all other stars except Sirius, before fading again over the next decade, becoming too dim to be seen with the naked eye.

What had happened to cause this outburst? Did 19th-century astronomers witness some strange type of supernova, a star ending its life in a cataclysmic explosion?

Ever since the 1950s discovery of the solar wind - the constant flow of charged particles from the sun - there's been a stark disconnect between this outpouring and the sun itself. As it approaches Earth, the solar wind is gusty and turbulent. But near the sun where it originates, this wind is structured in distinct rays, much like a child's simple drawing of the sun. The details of the transition from defined rays in the corona, the sun's upper atmosphere, to the solar wind have been, until now, a mystery.

Ahuna Mons is a volcano that rises 13,000 feet high and spreads 11 miles wide at its base. This would be impressive for a volcano on Earth. But Ahuna Mons stands on Ceres, a dwarf planet less than 600 miles wide that orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Even stranger, Ahuna Mons isn't built from lava the way terrestrial volcanoes are -- it's built from ice.

FRANKFURT. Can life be brought to celestial bodies outside our solar system which are not permanently inhabitable? This is the question with which Professor Dr. Claudius Gros from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt is dealing in an essay which will shortly appear in the scientific journal Astrophysics and Space Science.

Fascinating new light could be shed on the complex atmospheres of planets which orbit stars outside our own solar system, thanks to pioneering new research.

A team of international researchers, led by astrophysicists from the University of Exeter, Columbia University and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, used state-of -the-art modelling techniques to extensively study the atmosphere of a 'hot Jupiter' found 150 lightyears from Earth.

In order for Hermine or any other tropical depression, to intensify there must be a pathway for heat energy from the ocean surface to enter the atmosphere. For Hermine, the conduit may have been one of the two "hot towers" that the Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite observed on Aug. 31 at 4:09 p.m. EDT (2009 UTC).

This disruption to the wind pattern - called the "quasi-biennial oscillation" - did not have any immediate impact on weather or climate as we experience it on Earth's surface. But it does raise interesting questions for the NASA scientists who observed it: If a pattern holds for six decades and then suddenly changes, what caused that to happen? Will it happen again? What effects might it have?

NASA's Terra satellites provided a visible view of Typhoon Namtheun when it was moving through Japan's Ryukyu Islands. Namtheun is expected to make landfall in Japan's large island of Kyushu on Sept. 3.

Great Tits (Parus major) are synanthropes who have followed humans into large cities. A team led by Philipp Sprau at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Seewiesen has investigated the adaptive mechanisms needed by the birds for urban life. Their study has shown that while Great Tits begin to breed earlier in cities, their clutches are smaller and nestlings weigh less than their rural counterparts upon leaving the nest.

Differences between cities and rural environments

Although Tropical Storm Madeline weakened to a depression, infrared satellite imagery showed a small burst of strength in the storm as strong thunderstorms developed near the center of the storm.

Early in the morning of Sept. 1, 2016, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, caught both Earth and the moon crossing in front of the sun. SDO keeps a constant eye on the sun, but during SDO's semiannual eclipse seasons, Earth briefly blocks SDO's line of sight each day - a consequence of SDO's geosynchronous orbit. On Sept. 1, Earth completely eclipsed the sun from SDO's perspective just as the moon began its journey across the face of the sun. The end of the Earth eclipse happened just in time for SDO to catch the final stages of the lunar transit.